This year’s Pardi di domani winners prove once again that plenty of talent is around and it succeeds in reaching beyond borders; one can certainly anticipate their continuous bright futures.
Siyah Güneş (Black Sun) by Turkish filmmaker Arda Çiltepe is a beautiful symbolic auditive and visual meditation on life, death and its transcendent nature; where haptic routines and the sounds of a journey merge into tale on family ties and loss – awarded the Pardino d’oro for the Best International Short Film (Premio SRG SSR). Life takes its toll in up-and-coming director Dejan Barac’s Swiss short Mama Rosa, portraying the life of an Croatian woman whose relentless efforts are taken for granted: a devastatingly, heart-breaking documentary of a woman’s inescapable fait bound by an indifferent environment – winner of this year’s Pardino d’oro for the Best Swiss Short Film (Premio Swiss Life). Another point-of-view on the wrongs in society is given in Danski Tang’s US short Umbilical: poetically charged, animated drawings that visualize the close bond between a mother and a daughter, giving voice to their reciprocal, painful and abusive experiences; and recipient of the Pardino d’argento SRG SSR for the Concorso internazional Pardi di domani. Recent film graduate Anaïs Moog’s Tempête Silencieuse is a powerful, sensitive depiction – introspecting in step with the remaining ruins of the past and the unsettling waves of the ocean – of women’s stories of heartache – awardee of the Pardino d’argento Swiss Life for the Concorso nazionale Pardi di domani. Moog’s story is contrasted with the escapist tale of a man threatened by his unbearable downbeat circumstance, pervaded by scarcity, emptiness and dead corpses, Anton Sazonov’s Otpusk (Leave of Absence), which receives the Pardi di domani Best Direction Prize (PIANIFICA). Procrastination is ever present in Kim Allamand’s Terminal – an endearing lyrical story of waiting for the right moment that might never come – winning the Award for the Best Swiss Newcomer, which provides equipment and services by Cinegrell, Visuals SA, Freestudios and Taurus Studio. And this edition’s winner of the Medien Patent Verwaltung AG Prize is Akosua Adoma’s White Afro: an visually stunning and multi-layered rendering of archive material reflecting on race and societal conventions.
All of these works have well deserved their praise, offering a colorful palette of tales sparked with utterly creative and immensely poetic montages ought to be heard and seen.